According to journalist Heather Boerner, author of Positively Negative: Love, Pregnancy, and Science’s Surprising Victory Over HIV, the options for creating a healthy family keep growing and now include both pregnancy and adoption.

Parents are bombarded with books about how to parent, but what dealing with other kids’ parents? We're talking the lot of them: the mavens, the bossy ones, the rude ones, the passive-aggressive ones, the competitive ones, the organized (and disorganzied) ones. And what about the parent-sized teacher's pets?

When I was growing up my father was diagnosed with cancer, a metastatic, malignant, melanoma that grew as a mass of black on his lower back (imagine a giant portobello mushroom sprouting where it shouldn't be).